Digital image processing technology is widely applied to various electronic devices nowadays, to realize face recognition, facial beautification, age judgment, facial expression detection, gender identification, man-machine interaction, driving assistance and/or medical assistance, etc., through taking images by the electronic devices. The applicant notices that, in the implementation of these applications, it is required to detect the face and identify the face area before the follow-up detection, in order to meet practical needs.
In conventional technologies, the taken image is generally traversed through a face detection window, to primarily identify the face area. However, in the process of traversing, for each movement of the face detection window, it is required to analyze the corresponding image and determine whether a predetermined condition is met, which takes a long time and cannot meet the requirement of fast face area acquisition for the user.